The Athribis surge

Davila reports: 3000 more ostraca are found in the upper Nile city Athribis.

Not to be confused with the Delta city, this Athribis is in the Sohag region, which came to host a monastery complex. It is very close to Akhmim which has its own monastic tradition. It hosted its own dialect of Coptic, related to Sahidic.

The ostraca now number the highest collection in Egypt. Most of them are, naturally, Egyptian. I don't know exactly how they estimate 60-75% Demotic though, as compared with the 15-30% Greek. We know why there's Greek here: Ptolemy VII Euergetes ("Benefactor" in Latin) did a lot of work on the temples, as the family must, as known from Rosetta. Some demotic might be hard to distinguish from Arabic; some Greek is assuredly hard to distinguish from Coptic. Because Arabic and Coptic do round it all out, along with some hieratic and hieroglyphic. Also some of these are writing exercises: what's the difference between a Coptic "A" and an alpha?

Most valuable may be the scraps of hymnody, assuredly part of the writing exercises, or maybe just crib sheets (lol).